I have said the English are a sweet and mellow people.  There is, indeed, a charm about these ancestral races that goes to the heart.  And herein was one of the profoundest surprises of my visit, namely, that, in coming from the New World to the Old, from a people the most recently out of the woods of any, to one of the ripest and venerablest of the European nationalities, I should find a race more simple, youthful, and less sophisticated than the one I had left behind me.  Yet this was my impression.  We have lost immensely in some things, and what we have gained is not yet so obvious or so definable.  We have lost in reverence, in homeliness, in heart and conscience,—­in virtue, using the word in its proper sense.  To some, the difference which I note may appear a difference in favor of the great cuteness, wideawakeness, and enterprise of the American, but it is simply a difference expressive of our greater forwardness.  We are a forward people, and the god we worship is Smartness.  In one of the worst tendencies of the age, namely, an impudent, superficial, journalistic intellectuality and glibness, America, in her polite and literary circles, no doubt leads all other nations.  English books and newspapers show more homely veracity, more singleness of purpose, in short more character, than ours.  The great charm of such a man as Darwin, for instance, is his simple manliness and transparent good faith, and the absence in him of that finical, self-complacent smartness which is the bane of our literature.

The poet Clough thought the New England man more simple than the man of Old England.  Hawthorne, on the other hand, seemed reluctant to admit that the English were a “franker and simpler people, from peer to peasant,” than we are; and that they had not yet wandered so far from that “healthful and primitive simplicity in which man was created” as have their descendants in America.  My own impression accords with Hawthorne’s.  We are a more alert and curious people, but not so simple,—­not so easily angered, nor so easily amused.  We have partaken more largely of the fruit of the forbidden tree.  The English have more of the stay-at-home virtues, which, on the other hand, they no doubt pay pretty well for by their more insular tendencies.

The youths and maidens seemed more simple, with their softer and less intellectual faces.  When I returned from Paris, the only person in the second-class compartment of the car with me, for a long distance, was an English youth eighteen or twenty years old, returning home to London after an absence of nearly a year, which he had spent as waiter in a Parisian hotel.  He was born in London and had spent nearly his whole life there, where his mother, a widow, then lived.  He talked very freely with me, and told me his troubles, and plans, and hopes, as if we had long known each other.  What especially struck me in the youth was a kind of sweetness and innocence—­perhaps what some would call “greenness”—­that