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borrow their criticisms on England from those writing in that country. Thus, Mr. H. G. Wells, a novelist and scientist in one, but not himself a university man, writes in the Fortnightly Review of "the ordinary Oxford, Cambridge, or London B. A.:" "He has a useless smattering of Greek; he cannot read Latin with any comfort, much less write or speak that tongue; he knows a few unedifying facts round and about the classical literature; he cannot speak or read French with any comfort; he has an imperfect knowledge of the English language, insufficient to write it clearly, and none of German; he has a queer, old-fashioned, and quite useless knowledge of certain rudimentary sections of mathematics, and an odd little bite out of history. He knows practically nothing of the world of thought embodied in English literature, and absolutely nothing of contemporary thought; he is totally ignorant of modern political or social science. If he knows anything of evolutionary science and heredity it is probably matter picked up in a casual way from the magazines, and art is a sealed book to him."

And lest it be said that Mr. Wells, with all his knowledge and brilliancy, is not himself a graduate of any English university, it is fair to cite the opinion of Mr. Rudolph C. Lehmann (Trinity College, Cambridge, M. A.), who, after spending much time in America, where he was familiar with our university life, makes the following remark as to the English and American schoolboy. He writes:

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and modern history, whether of his own country or of the world in general, is a sealed book to him."

No criticism from Americans is more common than that as to the greater slowness of the English mind as compared with the American; and Professor Tyndall, when lecturing in this country, was amused to find, as he told me, that whereas in making experiments before a London audience he had to repeat his explanation three times, once to make his hearers comprehend what he was about to do, then to show what he was doing, and then to explain what he had done, he could after his first lecture in America omit the final explanation, and latterly the middle one as well. He also told a story to the same effect about an English manager of a " minstrel " troupe, traveling in America, who was accustomed to prolong his jokes by the aid of two end men, each bringing out a part of the joke, but who found with indignation that every American audience

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caught on" without waiting for the second end man. Yet the careful American observer soon finds that the standard of quickness is to be determined in England, as everywhere else, by the point of view. People who go slowly on new ground may turn out to be quick enough when wholly at home with any particular line of thought.

How odious and complicated, for instance, seems to an American observer the computation of pounds, shillings, and pence! It seems strange that any nation should consent for a day to employ anything but a decimal currency; yet with what lightning rapidity does a London bookkeeper make his computations! Again, what a life of tedious formality seems that of an English house servant; yet there was no slowness of intellect in that footman, in an earl's family, who, when his young lord fell over the banister, and his younger brother called to ask if the elder boy was hurt, answered promptly, "Killed, my lord!" thus pro

moting the second son to the peerage while the elder was falling over the banister. Even in the House of Commons, the difference from an American deliberative body is found to vary according to the point from which you look at the discussion. The Englishman begins with a curious air of hesitation, whereas the American glides into his speech at once; but the difference is that the Englishman suddenly surprises you by coming to his point with clearness and decision, after which he amazes you yet more by sitting down; whereas the American, after his first good hit, is apt to seem intoxicated by his own success, and feels bound to keep on indefinitely, waiting for another. You are left under the impression that an ideal speech in any debating body would be achieved by having an American to begin it and an Englishman to end it.

Such plain facts as these show the injustice of attributing to our cousins any deliberate unfairness to ourselves, and any conscious spirit of boastfulness. We have only to read the newspapers to see that party spirit rises, on the whole, higher in England than here; and certainly it is impossible for our cousins to criticise us with more formidable frankness than that which they apply to one another. No man who ever lived was more universally claimed as a typical Englishman than Walter Savage Landor, and yet he wrote to Lady Blessington, "I would not live in London the six winter months for £1000 a week. No, not even with the privilege of hanging a Tory on every lamp arm to the right, and a Whig on every one to the left, the whole extent of Piccadilly."

It must be remembered that the progress of events is in one respect, at least, distinctly drawing the two nations into closer connection. The advance of colonization undoubtedly tends to democratize England, while the same development has the opposite effect in America. Froude, in his travels, found the British

colonists, here and there, thinking that Tennyson must have lost his wits to accept a peerage, and it is well remembered that at least one of those who came to the Queen's Jubilee to represent different regions of the globe refused a proffered knighthood on the ground that his constituents would not endure it. Anglo-Indian life, to be sure, shows no such results, the conditions there being wholly different; but I speak of the self-governing colonies like Canada and Australia; and no one can have stayed any time under the same roof with such colonists in England, or paced the quarter-deck with them on board ship, without feeling them to be nearer to Americans than to Englishmen in their general mental attitude. Both would probably be criticised by Englishmen as having that combination, which a high educational authority once selected as the quality most frequently produced by the great English public schools, "a certain shy bumptiousness."

Perhaps the best single key to the lingering difference between English and American temperament is to be found in that precept brought to the front in almost any text-book of morals or manners one can open in England, bidding each man to be faithful to that station of life to which he is called. For the American upon whom has always been. imposed the duty of creating for himself his own station, this seems to explain all the vast and unsatisfactory results which seem to follow from the English method. Is the calling equally providential and even sacred, no matter from whom the voice proceeds? The first glance at the history of the English peerage shows us six peerages created to ennoble the offspring of Charles II, who left no legitimate child. Seven more were created by William IV for his illegitimate and his two illegitimate daughters were the wives of peers. All these families are entitled to use the royal liveries. Next to this lineage of degrada

sons;

tion come the peerages and other grades of rank founded primarily on wealth, a process naturally beginning with the lower grades. Hume tells us that James I created the order of Baronets in 1611 by selling two hundred of those titles for a thousand pounds each. Mr. Pitt went so far as to say that all men whose income was rated at more than twelve thousand pounds should be in the House of Lords. How systematically this method has been carried on to this day may be seen in the following passage from the Spectator of May 23, 1896:

"The Birthday Honors published on May 20 hardly call for comment. Lord Salisbury does not distribute them eccentrically, but according to the regular custom, taking wealthy squires like Mr. E. Heneage and Colonel Malcolm of Poltalloch for his peerages; and giving baronetcies to Mr. R. U. P. Fitzgerald, Mr. W. O. Dalgleish, Mr. Lewis McIver, Mr. J. Verdin, and Mr. C. Cave, because they are wealthy men who have done service to the party."

If it be said that this process does not vary essentially from the method by which social rank is created in America, the reply is plain enough. Grant that the two forms of aristocracy have much in common, both in their sense of power, and in that comforting fact which Lady Eastlake so finely pointed out, that both of them often "return to the simplest tastes; they have everything that man can make, and therefore they turn to what only God can make." Nevertheless there is this further difference, that, as Mr. Howells has so well shown, though the rich man may look down as distinctly as the lord can, the poor man does not equally look up. Note, too, that in the next place, the prestige of the rich American vanishes with his wealth, and in case he dies poor, his children inherit nothing; whereas inherited rank in England goes by blood only, and is not impaired by the fact that it passes afterwards into the hands of a bankrupt or a scoundrel.

The same limitation applies to the riches of the brain, which may also refuse to be hereditary. One can hardly cast so much as a glance at the United States Senate in session, and then at the English House of Lords in session, without recognizing the American elective body to have a far more intellectual aspect than the other assemblage; or without further observing that nine tenths of the visible intellect in the British House is to be seen in the faces and foreheads of the Bench of Bishops, or the so-called Law Lords, whose origin may have been of the humblest. "Why noble Earls should be so ugly," wrote one English observer of some note in his day, "is a problem in nature;" but the question is not that of mere beauty or ugliness; it is of visible mental power.

Even so far as a possible heredity goes, it must be recognized that a republican life is what makes grandparents most truly interesting. Free from the technical whims of an organized peerage, - such, for instance, as primogeniture, one is left free to trace for good or for evil his inheritance from the various lines of ancestry. Those lines may be drawn with especial interest from public service or social prominence; from pursuits, or education, or even wealth. Whittier's Quaker inheritance was as important to him as Longfellow's parentage of judges and landed proprietors was to him. I knew an American radical, who, on going to England, paid some one at the Heralds' College to look up his ancestry. Coming back to London some months later, he found that the inquirer had gone back no farther, as yet, than to reach one of his name who was hanged as a rebel under the Tudors. "Just as I expected," said the American in delight; "do not follow it any further. I am perfectly satisfied.”

Fifty years ago, so far as mere traveling was concerned, the distinctions of rank in the mother country did not intrude themselves on the American cousin.

It was the frequent habit of traveling Americans, visiting England for the first time, to assume that their hosts would be ungracious, and that they themselves must necessarily wear a hedgehog suit. As a matter of fact, however, even then, the American traveler usually laid aside his prickles on the second day, finding that there was no use for them in those small railway carriages. Traveling Englishmen of all conditions, at least on their own soil, turned out quite as ready to offer a railway guide, or a bit of advice, as in this country. It is to be remembered, moreover, that the whole system of traveling habits in England-railways, hotels, and all has greatly expanded and liberalized within that time. No doubt much of the former American injustice was due to the example of Englishmen of the last generation in doing injustice to one another. Horace Walpole said that he should love his country very much if it were not for his country'I hate Englishmen," said Keats, "for they are the only men I know." Heinrich Heine, that Parisian German, said that he was firmly convinced that a blaspheming Frenchman was regarded with more favor by the Almighty than a praying Englishman, and one might find, even among Englishmen themselves, almost equally piquant self-reproaching.

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On the other hand, the sense of truthfulness, of national rectitude, of a certain solid quality, comes over you like a whiff of English air in the very tone of voice of the first railway porter you meet. I recall vividly, as a type of this trait, a certain little English sergeant, with hair as fiery as his uniform, whom I met in an Irish post office in 1870. had landed at Cork the day before, on my first trans-Atlantic trip, soon after the civil war; and having been lately familiar with our own troops, felt a great desire to see those of the mother country. Having readily obtained information from him as to the barracks near by, we carried the conversation a little

further. My new acquaintance seemed pleased at hearing that I had taken a modest part in the civil war, and rather disappointed to find that I had been on what he evidently regarded as the wrong side. He told me in return that although now a sergeant of the Guards, he had previously served in another regiment. Leaving him presently, I went to purchase some stamps at the office, where I was somewhat delayed by other applicants, and also by a natural inexperience in handling British money. During this time I observed that my friend of the brilliant coloring was lingering and keeping his eye on me, as if waiting for some further interview; and as I went toward the door he approached me, and begged my pardon for saying something more. "I told you, sir," he said, "that I was a sergeant of the Guards, which is true. But I wish to explain that I was not originally a member of that regiment, but was transferred to it after the battle of the Alma, where I was severely wounded. I give you my word of honor, sir, that I am the very shortest man in the corps!" I could only think of the phrase attributed to the Duke of Wellington, "The Guard dies, but never surrenders!"

The name of the Guards suggests to me a striking instance where an English friend and distant kinsman of mine, then in command of the Grenadier Guards, found himself under the need of testing very suddenly the essential manhood of a body of Englishmen on the dangerous verge of what seemed for the moment an insurrection. It was on that well-remembered night when the London mob tore down the fences of Hyde Park, to be used either as bonfires or as barricades, as the case might be. On that perilous evening, this officer was dining at a friend's house, all unconscious of impending danger, when he received a summons from the War Department, telling him that his regiment was ordered out to deal with a mob. Hurrying

back to his own house, and calling for his man servant to saddle his horse, he found that the man had gone by permission for the evening, and had the key of the stable in his pocket; so that the officer, after hastily donning his uniform, must proceed on foot to the Guards' Armory, which lay on the other side of Hyde Park. Walking hastily in that direction, he came out unexpectedly at the very headquarters of the mob, where they were piling up the fences. Already his uniform had been recognized, and angry shouts began to rise. It must have seemed for the moment to the mob that the Lord had delivered their worst enemy into their hands. There was but one thing to be done. Making his way straight toward the centre of action, he called to a man mounted on the pile, the apparent leader of the tumult, "I say, my good fellow, my regiment has been called out by Her Majesty's orders. Will you give me a hand over this pile?" The man hesitated for an instant, and then said with decision, "Boys, the gentleman is right! He is doing his duty, and we have no quarrel with him. Lend a hand, and help him over." This was promptly done, with entire respect, and the officer, in his brilliant uniform, went hastily on his way amid three cheers from the mob, which then returned to its work, to be completed before he whom they had aided should come back at the head of his regiment, and, if needful, order them to be shot down.

Surely the most travel-worn American, one would think, when recalling such scenes, can never revisit London without being reminded of the noble description of that great capital in Milton's Areopagitica, written in 1644: "Behold now this vast city, a city of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded with his protection; the shop of war hath not there more anvils and hammers working, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed justice in defence of beleaguered truth, than there be pens and heads there sitting by

their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas wherewith to present, as with their homage and fealty, the approaching reformation ; others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement. . . . Under these fantastic terrors of sect and schism, we wrong the earnest and jealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this city."

When it comes to the use of their common language, the English and American cousins have no doubt those variations which habitually mark kindred families, even in adjacent houses; and, as between those families, there are always arguments on both sides, and many dictiona ries and even lexicons need to be turned over before coming to a decision. In the same way, when a New England farmer says, "I don't know nothin' about it," we are apt to forget that this double negative was a matter of course in the Anglo-Saxon (see Hickes's Thesaurus), as it still is in the French; and it may be found abundantly in Chaucer and in Shakespeare, as in Romeo and Juliet (act iii, scene v), –

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a sudden day of joy, That thou expect'st not nor I look'd not for." In the same way, when our country people say "learn me,” instead of “teach me," they have behind them the authority of the English Bible, "learn me true understanding," and also of Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare, the latter, curiously enough, sometimes employing both words in the same sentence, as in The Tempest (act i, scene ii) where Cali

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