there was little or no pretence of official costume.  It being the first considerable assemblage of Englishmen that I had seen, my honest impression about them was, that they were a heavy and homely set of people, with a remarkable roughness of aspect and behavior, not repulsive, but beneath which it required more familiarity with the national character than I then possessed always to detect the good-breeding of a gentleman.  Being generally middle-aged, or still farther advanced, they were by no means graceful in figure; for the comeliness of the youthful Englishman rapidly diminishes with years, his body appearing to grow longer, his legs to abbreviate themselves, and his stomach to assume the dignified prominence which justly belongs to that metropolis of his system.  His face (what with the acridity of the atmosphere, ale at lunch, wine at dinner, and a well-digested abundance of succulent food) gets red and mottled, and develops at least one additional chin, with a promise of more; so that, finally, a stranger recognizes his animal part at the most superficial glance, but must take time and a little pains to discover the intellectual.  Comparing him with an American, I really thought that our national paleness and lean habit of flesh gave us greatly the advantage in an aesthetic point of view.  It seemed to me, moreover, that the English tailor had not done so much as he might and ought for these heavy figures, but had gone on wilfully exaggerating their uncouthness by the roominess of their garments:  he had evidently no idea of accuracy of fit, and smartness was entirely out of his line.  But, to be quite open with the reader, I afterwards learned to think that this aforesaid tailor has a deeper art than his brethren among ourselves, knowing how to dress his customers with such individual propriety that they look as if they were born in their clothes, the fit being to the character rather than the form.  If you make an Englishman smart, (unless he be a very exceptional one, of whom I have seen a few,) you make him a monster:  his best aspect is that of ponderous respectability.

To make an end of these first impressions, I fancied that not merely the Suffolk bar, but the bar of any inland county in New England, might show a set of thin-visaged, green-spectacled men, looking wretchedly worn, sallow with the intemperate use of strong coffee, deeply wrinkled across the forehead, and grimly furrowed about the month, with whom these heavy-cheeked English lawyers, slow-paced and fat-witted as they must needs be, would stand very little chance in a professional contest.  How that matter might turn out I am unqualified to decide.  But I state these results of my earliest glimpses of Englishmen, not for what they are worth, but because I ultimately gave them up as worth little or nothing.  In course of time, I came to the conclusion that Englishmen of all ages are a rather good-looking people, dress in admirable taste from their own point of view, and, under a surface