“I was led to believe before coming here that I should not be able to tell that Boston was not an English town.  It did not so impress me on a surface-view, but it was not long before I recognized that the warp and woof of the social fabric is that of our looms, though the pattern is a little different,—­a good sort of stuff, I think, warranted to wash and wear.  The variation, such as it is, tried by what I call my differential nationometer, gives to the place its own peculiar, delightful quality.”  The rigid gentleman, who was a great deal at the Porters’, was rather inclined to insist upon the great purity and beauty of his English, to which he repeatedly invited attention, and, as Mr. Ramsay would have said, “went in for” certain philological refinements which Sir Robert had never heard before, and thoroughly disliked.  But as there are more Scotchmen in London than in Edinburgh, and better oranges can be bought for less money in New York than in New Orleans, so it may be that if you want to find really superior English you must leave England altogether,—­abandon it to its defective but firmly-rooted patois, and seek in more classic shades for the well—­spring of Saxon undefiled.  But Sir Robert was not inclined to do this.  There were limits to his liberality and spirit of investigation.  When the rigid gentleman instanced certain words to which he gave a pronunciation that made them bear small resemblance to the same words as spoken by any class of people laboring under the disadvantage of having been born and bred in England, Sir Robert got impatient, and testily dismissed the subject with, “Oh, come, now!  I can stand a good deal, but I can’t stand being told that we don’t know how to speak English in England.”  Something, however, must be pardoned to a foreigner.  If Sir Robert would not consent to set Emerson a little higher than the angels, as some other Bostonians could have wished, and had never so much as heard of Thoreau and other American celebrities not wholly insignificant, he had an immense admiration for Longfellow, and could spout “Hiawatha” or “Evangeline” with the best, associated Hawthorne with something besides his own hedges in the month of May, and was eager to be taken out to Beverly Farms, that he might “do himself the honor to call upon” the wisest, wittiest, least-dreaded, and best-loved of Autocrats.  When the day fixed for his departure came, he was still revelling in what the Historical Society of Massachusetts had to show him, and actually stayed over a day that he might see the finest collection of cacti in the country, and at last tore himself away with much difficulty and lively regrets, carrying with him a collection of Indian curiosities given him by Mr. Porter, whom he considered to have behaved “most handsomely” in making him such a present.  “I can’t rob you outright, my dear fellow.  I feel a cut-purse, almost, when I think of taking all these valuable and deeply-interesting objects illustrative of the life and civilization