Perhaps nothing in any of his vigorous paragraphs is more striking than the suggestion that “if hereafter the war of races often predicted, and making itself a war of opinions also (a question of despotism and liberty coming from Eastern Europe), should menace the English civilization, these sea-kings may take once again to their floating castles and find a new home and a second millennium of power in their colonies.”

In reading some of Emerson’s pages it seems as if another Arcadia, or the new Atlantis, had emerged as the fortunate island of Great Britain, or that he had reached a heaven on earth where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal,—­or if they do, never think of denying that they have done it.  But this was a generation ago, when the noun “shoddy,” and the verb “to scamp,” had not grown such familiar terms to English ears as they are to-day.  Emerson saw the country on its best side.  Each traveller makes his own England.  A Quaker sees chiefly broad brims, and the island looks to him like a field of mushrooms.

The transplanted Church of England is rich and prosperous and fashionable enough not to be disturbed by Emerson’s flashes of light that have not come through its stained windows.

“The religion of England is part of good-breeding.  When you see on the continent the well-dressed Englishman come into his ambassador’s chapel, and put his face for silent prayer into his smooth-brushed hat, one cannot help feeling how much national pride prays with him, and the religion of a gentleman.

“The church at this moment is much to be pitied.  She has nothing left but possession.  If a bishop meets an intelligent gentleman, and reads fatal interrogation in his eyes, he has no resource but to take wine with him.”

Sydney Smith had a great reverence for a bishop,—­so great that he told a young lady that he used to roll a crumb of bread in his hand, from nervousness, when he sat next one at a dinner-table,—­and if next an archbishop, used to roll crumbs with both hands,—–­but Sydney Smith would have enjoyed the tingling felicity of this last stinging touch of wit, left as lightly and gracefully as a banderillero leaves his little gayly ribboned dart in the shoulders of the bull with whose unwieldy bulk he is playing.

Emerson handles the formalism and the half belief of the Established Church very freely, but he closes his chapter on Religion with soft-spoken words.

“Yet if religion be the doing of all good, and for its sake the suffering of all evil, souffrir de tout le monde, et ne faire souffrir personne, that divine secret has existed in England from the days of Alfred to those of Romilly, of Clarkson, and of Florence Nightingale, and in thousands who have no fame.”

“English Traits” closes with Emerson’s speech at Manchester, at the annual banquet of the “Free Trade Athenaeum.”  This was merely an occasional after-dinner reply to a toast which called him up, but it had sentences in it which, if we can imagine Milton to have been called up in the same way, he might well have spoken and done himself credit in their utterance.