“Go far and go sparing;
  For you’ll find it certain,
  The poorer and the baser you appear,
  The more you’ll look through still."[A]

[Footnote A:  Beaumont and Fletcher:  The Tamer Tamed.]

Not much otherwise Milnes writes, in the “Lay of the Humble":—­

  “To me men are for what they are,
  They wear no masks with me.”

’Tis odd that our people should have—­not water on the brain,—­but a little gas there.  A shrewd foreigner said of the Americans, that “whatever they say has a little the air of a speech.”  Yet one of the traits down in the books, as distinguishing the Anglo-Saxon, is a trick of self-disparagement.  To be sure, in old, dense countries, among a million of good coats, a fine coat comes to be no distinction, and you find humorists.  In an English party, a man with no marked manners or features, with a face like red dough, unexpectedly discloses wit, learning, a wide range of topics, and personal familiarity with good men in all parts of the world, until you think you have fallen upon some illustrious personage.  Can it be that the American forest has refreshed some weeds of old Pictish barbarism just ready to die out,—­the love of the scarlet feather, of beads, and tinsel?  The Italians are fond of red clothes, peacock-plumes, and embroidery; and I remember, one rainy morning in the city of Palermo, the street was in a blaze with scarlet umbrellas.  The English have a plain taste.  The equipages of the grandees are plain.  A gorgeous livery indicates new and awkward city-wealth.  Mr. Pitt, like Mr. Pym, thought the title of Mister good against any king in Europe.  They have piqued themselves on governing the whole world in the poor, plain, dark committee-room which the House of Commons sat in before the fire.

Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.  The countryman finds the town a chop-house, a barber’s shop.  He has lost the lines of grandeur of the horizon, hills and plains, and, with them, sobriety and elevation.  He has come among a supple, glib-tongued tribe, who live for show, servile to public opinion.  Life is dragged down to a fracas of pitiful cares and disasters.  You say the gods ought to respect a life whose objects are their own; but in cities they have betrayed you to a cloud of insignificant annoyances:—­

  “Mirmidons, race feconde,
  Mirmidons,
  Enfins nous commandons;
  Jupiter livre le monde
  Aux mirmidons, aux mirmidons."[B]

  [Footnote B:  Beranger.]

  ’Tis heavy odds
  Against the gods,
  When they will match with myrmidons. 
  We spawning, spawning myrmidons,
  Our turn to-day; we take command: 
  Jove gives the globe into the hand
  Of myrmidons, of myrmidons.