convenience, and to defecate it of all emotion as thoroughly as algebraic signs.  This has arisen, no doubt, in part from that healthy national contempt of humbug which is characteristic of Englishmen, in part from that sensitiveness to the ludicrous which makes them so shy of expressing feeling, but in part also, it is to be feared, from a growing distrust, one might almost say hatred, of whatever is super-material.  There is something sad in the scorn with which their journalists treat the notion of there being such a thing as a national ideal, seeming utterly to have forgotten that even in the affairs of this world the imagination is as much matter-of-fact as the understanding.  If we were to trust the impression made on us by some of the cleverest and most characteristic of their periodical literature, we should think England hopelessly stranded on the good-humored cynicism of well-to-do middle-age, and should fancy it an enchanted nation, doomed to sit forever with its feet under the mahogany in that after-dinner mood which follows conscientious repletion, and which it is ill-manners to disturb with any topics more exciting than the quality of the wines.  But there are already symptoms that a large class of Englishmen are getting weary of the dominion of consols and divine common-sense, and to believe that eternal three per cent. is not the chief end of man, nor the highest and only kind of interest to which the powers and opportunities of England are entitled.

The quality of exaggeration has often been remarked on as typical of American character, and especially oL American humor.  In Dr. Petri’s Gedraengtes Handbuch der Fremdwoerter, we are told that the word humbug is commonly used for the exaggerations of the North-Americans.  To be sure, one would be tempted to think the dream of Columbus half fulfilled, and that Europe had found in the West a nearer way to Orientalism, at least in diction.  But it seems tome that a great deal of what is set down as mere extravagance is more fitly to be called intensity and picturesqueness, symptoms ol the imaginative faculty in full health and strength, though producing, as yet, only the raw and formless material in which poetry is to work.  By and by, perhaps, the world will see it fashioned into poem and picture, and Europe, which will be hard pushed for originality erelong, may have to thank us for a new sensation.  The French continue to find Shakespeare exaggerated because he treated English just as our country-folk do when they speak of a ‘steep price,’ or say that they ‘freeze to’ a thing.  The first postulate of an original literature is that a people should use their language instinctively and unconsciously, as if it were a lively part of their growth and personality, not as the mere torpid boon of education or inheritance.  Even Burns contrived to write very poor verse and prose in English.  Vulgarisms are often only poetry in the egg.  The late Mr. Horace Mann, in one of his public addresses,