and “Esquire.”  Admissions such as these, coming from such a man as he, are of untold value in promoting the growth of a proper sentiment towards our transatlantic kinsmen.  When he points out that the dangers of such a community as the United States include a tendency to rely too much on the machinery of institutions; an absence of the discipline of respect; a proneness to hardness, materialism, exaggeration, and boastfulness; a false smartness and a false audacity,—­the wise American will do well to ponder his sayings, hard though they may sound.  When, however, he goes on to point out the “prime necessity of civilisation being interesting,” and to assert that American civilisation is lacking in interest, we may well doubt whether on the one hand the quality of interest is not too highly exalted, and, on the other, whether the denial of interest to American life does not indicate an almost insular narrowness in the conception of what is interesting.  When he finds a want of soul and delicacy in the American as compared with John Bull, some of us must feel that if he is right the latitude of interpretation of these terms must indeed be oceanic.  When he gravely cites the shrewd and ingenious Benjamin Franklin as the most considerable man whom America has yet produced, we must respectfully but firmly take exception to his standard of measurement.  When he declares that Abraham Lincoln has no claim to distinction, we feel that the writer must have in mind distinction of a singularly conventional and superficial nature; and we are not reassured by the quasi brutality of the remark in one of his letters, to the effect that Lincoln’s assassination brought into American history a dash of the tragic and romantic in which it had hitherto been so sadly lacking ("sic semper tyrannis is so unlike anything Yankee or English middle class").  When he asserts that from Maine to Florida and back again all America Hebraises, we reflect with some bewilderment that hitherto we had believed the New Orleans creole (e.g.) to be as far removed from Hebraising as any type we knew of.  It is strikingly characteristic of the weak side of Mr. Arnold’s outlook on America that he went to stay with Mr. P.T.  Barnum, the celebrated showman, without the least idea that his American friends might think the choice of hosts a peculiar one.  To him, to a very large extent, Americans were all alike middle-class, dissenting Philistines; and so far as appears on the surface, Mr. Barnum’s desire to “belong to the minority” pleased him as much as any other sign of approval conferred upon him in America.

A native of the British Isles is sometimes apt to be a little nettled when he finds a native of the United States regarding him as a “foreigner” and talking of him accordingly.  An Englishman never means the natives of the United States when he speaks of “foreigners;” he reserves that epithet for non-English-speaking races.  In this respect it would seem as if the Briton, for once,