perhaps especially, when you know yourself to be in all respects the superior of the patroniser—­may tickle your sense of humour for a while, but in the long run it is distinctly dispiriting.  The philosopher, no doubt, is or should be able to disregard the petty annoyances arising from an ever-present consciousness of social limitation, but society is not entirely composed of philosophers, even in America; and the sense of freedom and space is unqualifiedly welcome to its members.  It is not easy for a European to the manner born to realise the sort of extravagant, nightmare effect that many of our social customs have in the eyes of our untutored American cousins.  The inherent absurdities that are second nature to us exhale for them the full flavour of their grotesqueness.  The idea of an insignificant boy peer taking precedence of Mr. John Morley!  The idea of having to appear before royalty in a state of partial nudity on a cold winter day!  The necessity of backing out of the royal presence!  The idea of a freeborn Briton having to get out of an engagement long previously formed on the score that “he has been commanded to dine with H.R.H.”  The horrible capillary plaster necessary before a man can serve decently as an opener of carriage-doors!  The horsehair envelopes without which our legal brains cannot work!  The unwritten law by which a man has to nurse his hat and stick throughout a call unless his hostess specially asks him to lay them aside!

Mr. Bryce commits himself to the assertion that “Scotchmen and Irishmen are more unlike Englishmen, the native of Normandy more unlike the native of Provence, the Pomeranian more unlike the Wurtemberger, the Piedmontese more unlike the Neapolitan, the Basque more unlike the Andalusian, than the American from any part of the country is to the American from any other.”  Max O’Rell, on the other hand, writes:  “L’habitant du Nord-est des Etats Unis, le Yankee, differe autant de l’Americain de l’Ouest et du Midi que l’Anglais differe de l’Allemand ou de l’Espagnol.”  On this point I find myself far more in accord with the French than with the British observer, though, perhaps, M. Blouet rather overstates his case.  Wider differences among civilised men can hardly be imagined than those which subsist between the creole of New Orleans and the Yankee of Maine, the Kentucky farmer and the Michigan lumberer.  It is, however, true that there is a distinct tendency for the stamp of the Eastern States to be applied to the inhabitants of the cities, at least, of the West.  The founders of these cities are so largely men of Eastern birth, the means of their expansion are so largely advanced by Eastern capitalists, that this tendency is easily explicable. [So far as my observation went it was to Boston rather than to New York or Philadelphia that the educated classes of the Western cities looked as the cynosure of their eyes.  Boston seemed to stand for something less material than these other