“They keep their old customs, costumes, and pomps, their wig and mace, sceptre and crown.  A severe decorum rules the court and the cottage.  Pretension and vaporing are once for all distasteful.  They hate nonsense, sentimentalism, and high-flown expressions; they use a studied plainness.”

    “In an aristocratical country like England, not the Trial by Jury,
    but the dinner is the capital institution.”

    “They confide in each other,—­English believes in English.”—­“They
    require the same adherence, thorough conviction, and reality in
    public men.”

    “As compared with the American, I think them cheerful and contented. 
    Young people in this country are much more prone to melancholy.”

Emerson’s observation is in accordance with that of Cotton Mather nearly two hundred years ago.

“New England, a country where splenetic Maladies are prevailing and pernicious, perhaps above any other, hath afforded numberless instances, of even pious people, who have contracted those Melancholy Indispositions, which have unhinged them from all service or comfort; yea, not a few persons have been hurried thereby to lay Violent Hands upon themselves at the last.  These are among the unsearchable Judgments of God.”

If there is a little exaggeration about the following portrait of the Englishman, it has truth enough to excuse its high coloring, and the likeness will be smilingly recognized by every stout Briton.

“They drink brandy like water, cannot expend their quantities of waste strength on riding, hunting, swimming, and fencing, and run into absurd follies with the gravity of the Eumenides.  They stoutly carry into every nook and corner of the earth their turbulent sense; leaving no lie uncontradicted; no pretension unexamined.  They chew hasheesh; cut themselves with poisoned creases, swing their hammock in the boughs of the Bohon Upas, taste every poison, buy every secret; at Naples, they put St. Januarius’s blood in an alembic; they saw a hole into the head of the ‘winking virgin’ to know why she winks; measure with an English foot-rule every cell of the inquisition, every Turkish Caaba, every Holy of Holies; translate and send to Bentley the arcanum, bribed and bullied away from shuddering Bramins; and measure their own strength by the terror they cause.”

This last audacious picture might be hung up as a prose pendant to Marvell’s poetical description of Holland and the Dutch.

“A saving stupidity marks and protects their perception as the curtain of the eagle’s eye.  Our swifter Americans, when they first deal with English, pronounce them stupid; but, later, do them justice as people who wear well, or hide their strength.—­High and low, they are of an unctuous texture.—­Their daily feasts argue a savage vigor of body.—­Half their strength they put not forth.  The stability