The Englishman is the most truly rural in his tastes and habits of any people in the world.  I am speaking of the higher classes.  The aristocracy of other countries affect the camp and the city.  But the English love their old castles and country seats with a patriotic love.  They are fond of country sports.  Every man shoots or hunts.  No man is too old to be in the saddle some part of the day, and men of seventy years and more follow the hounds, and, take a five-barred gate at a leap.  The women are good whips, are fond of horses and dogs, and other animals.  Duchesses have their cows, their poultry, their pigs,—­all watched over and provided with accommodations of Dutch-like neatness.  All this is characteristic of the people.  It may be thought to detract something from the feminine graces which in other lands make a woman so amiably dependent as to be nearly imbecile.  But it produces a healthy and blooming race of women to match the hardy Englishman,—­the finest development of the physical and moral nature which the world has witnessed.  For we are not to look on the English gentleman as a mere Nimrod.  With all his relish for field sports and country usages, he has his house filled with collections of art and with extensive libraries.  The tables of the drawing-rooms are covered with the latest works, sent down by the London publisher.  Every guest is provided with an apparatus for writing, and often a little library of books for his own amusement.  The English country gentleman of the present day is anything but a Squire Western, though he does retain all his relish for field sports.

The character of an Englishman, under its most refined aspect, has some disagreeable points which jar unpleasantly on the foreigner not accustomed to them.  The consciousness of national superiority, combined with natural feelings of independence, gives him an air of arrogance, though it must be owned that this is never betrayed in his own house,—­I may almost say in his own country.  But abroad, when he seems to institute a comparison between himself and the people he is thrown with, it becomes so obvious that he is the most unpopular, not to say odious, person in the world.  Even the open hand with which he dispenses his bounty will not atone for the violence he offers to national vanity.

There are other defects, which are visible even in his most favored circumstances.  Such is his bigotry, surpassing everything in a quiet passive form, that has been witnessed since the more active bigotry of the times of the Spanish Philips.  Such, too, is the exclusive, limited range of his knowledge and conceptions of all political and social topics and relations.  The Englishman, the cultivated Englishman, has no standard of excellence borrowed from mankind.  His speculation never travels beyond his own little—­great little—­island.  That is the world to him.  True, he travels, shoots lions among the Hottentots, chases the grizzly bear over the Rocky