more than usually potent in the English nature, it follows that the English system of aristocracy has need to be more than usually exclusive and elabo rate. Regarded from this point of view, the English domination over India is a curious ethnologic episode. Governed and governors are both Hindoos; but the latter are the Hindoos of the present age, the former of a long-past one. The former derive their origin from the earliest dawn of human history; and beside them the latter are raw modern filibusters, whose clay is scarcely yet dry from the creative workshop. The Indian reverences caste, not for itself, but as it is allied with a mystic religious symbolism, whose foundations are hidden far away in regions of metaphysical subtilty. The Englishman bows to it on a bluntly material basis, and cares for metaphysics and symbolism not a snap of his finger. The Indian was powerful centuries ago when the world was ruled by superstition and mystery; the Englishman governs to-day when the sinews of power are steel and gold. Each has his season; but the Englishman shall doubtless be as comparatively transient as he is modern. The time may come when even the memory of his brief dynasty shall vanish out of the ancient Indian Empire, or survive only in the form of a curious and questionable tradition. But the historians of that epoch shall sågely affirm that, if he did indeed exist, he was probably created for and fulfilled some useful purpose. It was a period of mental and moral transition, and consequently of violence, shallowness, and skepticism; and the Anglo-Saxon typified well enough the prevailing characteristics of his age. He was a fleshly, crude, laughing creature, but his share in human progress, albeit involuntary, had its justification. He served as a providential pivot on which the laboring world might turn. Blessed be thou, O Brahma, who didst suffer him to be; blessed be thou who didst cause him to pass away! Great are the name and the glory of Brahma ! III. ALL this discussion is incidental to my main object, which was, to offer a few hints concerning the personal appearance and character of no less important a personage than my friend the landlord-or, as he prefers to be called, the captain. But before coming to him (who, being a particularly affable, social, and even convivial sort of man, will probably detain us a good while) I must request the reader's consideration of a rather singular paradox. It consists in the fact that a nation physically gross, and in spirit dullards-barbarous, skeptical, audacious, and servile -should nevertheless be not only often endurable, but, when one gets acquainted with them, among the most companionable, genial, and harmless people in the world. The English reserve, upon which so much stress has been laid, does not after all amount to much. It is a very superficial affair, and when it has passed away your Englishman is likely to become quite as communicative and familiar as it is convenient or pleasant to have him. There is nothing of the Sphinx in his composition: he is either all bristles or none at all. This reserve, in fact, is nothing more than a development of that instinctive and hostile suspicion which any two dogs will manifest toward each other when first they meet. Conscious of a number of disagreeables latent in themselves, they are partly apprehensive lest the stranger should find them out, and partly on their guard lest he should display similar qualities in himself. Sometimes the issue is a mutual repulsion; but more often there is a wagging of tails, a tacit agreement to ignore the disagreeables, and a friendly parade of all sorts of canine amenities. As with dogs, so with the Englishman. And here begins the paradox. It is easy to see how he can make himself offensive: the difficulty is plausibly to account for his ever being otherwise. When the catalogue of his faults has been recited, it seems impossible that there should be any room for redemption. Does he, in respect of his spiritual personality, turn himself inside out, and, for each asperity or point of repulsion, present us with a corresponding surface of attraction? Is what charms but another aspect of what offends? If so, it may be said with confidence that he needs all his faults, and the more he has of them the better. And, in truth, I doubt whether he would be so likable in his genial moods if he were not so abominable in his cross-grained ones. We are won not only by the force of contrast, but likewise by dint of the probable fact that a beauty which has an ugliness for its counterpart is apt to be of a heartier and more stirring constitution than a beauty which possesses no such flavoring. Moreover, the Englishman is a naïve and guileless animal; he is not ashamed of his faults, but rather proud of them, and occasionally he refers to them as virtues; and this quaint perversity doubtless prevents them from doing him as much harm as they otherwise might. I suppose, indeed, that few Englishmen would think of objecting to such strictures as I have made upon them, save on the ground of their coming from a foreigner. They are not averse from abusing themselves, and when the humor takes them they can do it as well-or as badly-as any one can do it for them. But, if we flatter ourselves that we shall gain or they lose anything by their self-depreciation, we shall find ourselves mistaken. For it must never be forgotten that, whatever evil an Englishman may say of himself, he remains none the less, in his own estimation, superior to any one else—a little the finest thing in the way of humanity that the Creative Power has turned out yet, or is likely to turn out hereafter. Consequently, where he admits himself reprehensible, we may consider ourselves damned. "And what," he will ask, "is after all the harm of being declared a pagan? It is only a form of speech, and pagans have heretofore made a respectable enough show in the world. As for the charge of brutality, it is only a way people have of confessing that they are afraid of us; and what is it to me to be called stupid when I can point to such men as Bacon, Shakespeare, Raleigh, Milton, and Newton, and call them Englishmen ?" Concerning this last point a word or two may be admissible. It appears to be a generally-accepted belief that the moral and intellectual capacity of a nation may be gauged by its greatest men. Bacon was not only an intellectual giant himself, but, since he was English born, the cause why intellectual giantship should be ascribed to his countrymen. He, by the power of his genius, rose to the highest rank of mind; and every fool or wise man who has had the luck to come to life in England since his time does thereby inherit a sort of mental patent of nobility; which patent their neighbors across the Channel, for instance, can by no means be suffered to infringe. (It would seem more reasonable if only that part of the English race which came into the world before Bacon's birth should take credit on his account -but let that pass.) To carry out the principle to its logical issue, we must suppose the townspeople of any given hero to be more heroic than those who reside in the adjoining township; and, as for his family circle, it should be brilliant indeed! To be sure, if we adhere to the modern scientific doctrine of force, we might expect the productive energy of Nature to have been taxed so severely in bringing forth the hero as to leave very little heroic material among the hero's surroundings: a view of the matter manifestly hostile to the theory we are discussing, but upon which, considering the present hypothetical attitude of scientific inquiry, it would not be prudent to insist. If the position be otherwise defensible, science may as well let it alone. But though great men unquestionably illustrate the capacity for good of the human race at large, it is difficult to see how they can reflect more lustre upon any one division of it than upon any other. Every man is a countryman of Shakespeare's precisely in so far as he can appreciate his writings; and whether he be an Esquimaux, a Patagonian, or an Englishman, is not at all to the point. Genius, or whatever it be in men that makes them great, has no apparent dependence on the individual's nationality, except in those cases where his nationality, or some like accidental circumstance, may conceivably clog his genius in its fuller exercise. And if genius is not made by its surroundings, what honor is due its surroundings on its account? What right more than the universal human right have its townspeople or its family circle to be proud of it? I admire Goethe's genius, and I do not admire the German people; and, if Goethe's genius were essentially a German commodity, I could not admire it; but, in fact, it has no nationality; it is Goethe's private and inalienable property, with which his countrymen can have nothing to do. They can meddle only with the physical part of Goethe-the part of him that is not admirable, and the influence of which upon his writings does not seem to have been for the better. As with Goethe, so with the other great ones of the earth. Who cares where their limbs were made and their infancy cradled? They must needs be born somewhere, and it is well for mankind that they have existed; they may acknowledge a brotherhood among themselves; but they are Greek or Persian, German or English, only in so far as they are flesh and blood; and that is a very little way indeed. IV. BUT it is impossible to keep the captain waiting any longer for the sake of discussing topics of this desultory and impertinent kind; and I shall therefore let my argument take care of itself, and apply myself to business. First, however, as regards that matter of English stupidity, there is one other observation to be made. They used to be in a somewhat more promising intellectual plight than they are now; it is at present between two and three hundred years ago, we may say, since they passed their prime. Fortunately for us, it was just about that time that the Pilgrim Fathers bethought themselves of separating from the old country; if they had been two centuries later, they would have had a worse start, and, if they had waited until to-day, it might not have been advisable for them to come at all. The mental power of Englishmen has not advanced since the seventeenth century, and, on the other hand, various external causes have been at work whereby the efficacy of what they had has been somewhat impaired. To use an agricultural simile, the spontaneous productiveness of the soil has begun to fail, and they are doing their best to make up for this loss by diligent and elaborate cultivation. A man who has worked conscientiously through the great English school and university course has enjoyed every advantage that the best modern systems of education can furnish him withal. And Englishmen, by virtue of their sturdy natural constitution, can stand more cultivating than perhaps any other living people. They are probably also better qualified than any others to illustrate the extreme results of our latterday theories of civilization. That civilization, as malcontents have often enough pointed out, does not control the vital springs of conduct, but occupies itself in regulating and polishing the exterior behavior. The moral condition of English people is in the same category with that of their minds; it dates back, as to its real quality, to the seventeenth century, but its defects have been gracefully enameled over by an admirable coating of social ceremonies and formalities. Regarded as a sheer work of art, there is no society so agreeable, so elegant, so undemonstrative, as that of the higher circles in England. To mingle in it is an æsthetic privilege and delight, to which no one can or ought to be indifferent. Tact and taste are studied in every particular; ear and eye are soothed and gratified; and, if ever the discord of naturalness and sincerity breaks in, it is transformed by dint of its very rarity into a piquant embellishment of the too even harmony. To thoughtful Englishmen, uncomfortably dowered with insight and given to moralizing, there may be something unsatisfactory and even sinister in this unruffled smoothness; but to foreigners, who are not concerned about what is to come of it all, the pleasure is without alloy. If they want ruggedness, earnestness, nakedness; if they wish to hear the creaking of the machinery of human progress, and to feel world, he must soon begin to take offense at his continued exclusion. He is an Englishman, and presumably conscious of the solemn fact of his superiority to all other classes of mankind; yet he would probably not consider us so much his inferiors as to be unable to put a slight upon him. Indeed, the only unfailing method of getting an Englishman honestly to put himself upon an equality with you is to insult him; it rarely happens that his pride is so overweening as to stand in the way of his offering to knock you down. But at all other times he puts himself quietly, unmistakably, and as a matter of course, in the ascendant. If you regard his behavior from a charitable point of view, you will generally find that there is nothing designedly offensive in it; and, as soon as you know him well enough to be on the lookout for him, he will often unconsciously afford you much genuine amusement. It is re the keen, uncompromising breeze blowing in their faces-they can easily enough put themselves in the way of it. But I think a refined person, gifted with a reasonable amount of selfishness, and satisfied with the minor activities and excitements of life, will be more inclined to pitch his tent in nineteenth-century England than elsewhere. For an American, the charm is, of course, peculiarly seductive. He is among a people speaking his own language-or at least something very like it-bearing his own names, and familiar with his own ancestry. He finds a perfection of social organization and equilibrium such as he will never live to see in his own land; and the suspicion or conviction that it has been purchased at the expense of national vitality will not hinder him from profiting by its advantages. He lives under a government which, except possibly as regards the native-born subjects of it, is the freest, easiest, and most desirable in the world. To belong to a repub-markable, too, if you can contrive to put yourself in lic, and to live under a constitutional monarchy, are probably to taste the sweetest cream of political happiness. In short, the American, by virtue of his English residence, subsists at once in the present and in the future, and culls the fairest flowers of both periods. He exults in the doughty struggles and noble prospects of his own country even more keenly than those who stay there, because his sensitiveness is not shocked nor his temper tried by the petty improprieties and annoyances inevitably incident to a condition of progress and development. He appreciates, even more unqualifiedly than the English themselves, the mellow and settled conditions of English existence; for he is not disturbed by their patriotic anxieties and irrepressible forebodings. He enjoys the exhilaration of the race without its fatigue, and the peace of the goal without its misgivings. One thought only is there that can cause him uneasiness; but that thought, alas! is formidable enough to outweigh a great deal of indolent self-indulgence. Sooner or later the question will intrude itself, whether that American is worthy of his name who does not return to bear with his countrymen the burden and heat of the day. Meanwhile, it is really necessary to remind the reader that the captain is waiting outside; and, granting him all the good-nature and affability in the his place, and look upon the world by the light of English prejudices and traditions, how exceedingly plausible and natural many of his greatest mistakes and absurdities will appear. And it is unquestionably true that England, from the English standpoint, is the most complete, compact, and definitely-characterized nation in existence; a nation to be loved almost as an individual, with a concentration and particularity of affection comparable to that which a lover might feel for his mistress. I am sure that, were I an Englishman, I should experience a fervor of patriotism beside which my American love of country would appear, if a broader and loftier, yet a vaguer and diffuser sentiment. But it is because the English are so amply justified in being patriotic that no outsider can ever share their enthusiasm. They are cut off from sympathy with the rest of the world in proportion as they are bound up in themselves. Once more, do not let us try one another's patience and compromise one another's sincerity by talking about Anglo-Saxon kinship, and the obligations to alliance of the two great English-speaking nations, and about blood's being thicker than water. We know perfectly well that in case of war we should kill each other all the more heartily on these accounts. Let us be content to be wholesomely discontented with each other, and some good may come of that. And now for the captain! RENCH society in the eighteenth century was and pomp have been described in a previous arwas the nobility, comprising families which had been in large part impecunious if not obscure, and who titled for at least three centuries; there was the were "overburdened with children, whose fathers bourgeoisie; and, below these, there were the com- and mothers were unable to give them a proper mon people. Each of these classes was subdi- education, much less to send them to court." The vided into differing ranks. The nobility was com- bourgeoisie were separated into three ranks. The posed of the court grandees, whose magnificence | highest of these were the ennobled bourgeois, those who had either been granted a title, such as baron or count, within recent years, or who were accounted noble by reason of their office or occupation. Such were judges and lawyers, abbés and bankers. The middle rank of bourgeois comprised the holders of the subordinate magisterial offices and administrative places, the more prosperous class of merchants, and the highly-respectable and old-established urban families. The lowest rank of the bourgeoisie included the smaller tradesfolk, and those engaged in industrial occupations. Coming to the lowest social his origin; he had no imposts to pay, neither the taille nor the poll-tax; he did not contribute in the least degree to the public weal; he did not often marry, and had few children, so as to be as unlike the artisans and cultivators as he possibly could." Between the splendor of the court and nobility above, and the want and penury, long gayly borne, of the people below, the bourgeoisie intervened as the great middle element of society, which redeemed France alike from a fatal indolence and the destiny of Rome, and from ignorance and barbarous passion. class, that of the people, we find them distinguished The bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century, indeed, as the people of Paris, the people of the provincial towns, and the people of the rural districts. Otherwise divided, they are to be classed as artisans, servants, and husbandmen. Among these various ranks of the lower orders, there was none of what the French call solidarité. It is said that "there was no affinity between the artisan and the husbandman, and they both looked down upon the domestic servant. The latter, though sprung from the people, which looked upon him as a degraded being who had passed over to the enemy, seemed to repudiate is the most interesting social study of the time. In its upper ranks it had wealth which rivaled that of the greatest ducal houses; it was elegant, refined, and, better still, it was, when compared with the dissoluteness of Versailles, conspicuously virtuous. In fashion, in display, in the imposing exterior and luxurious taste in the interior of their houses, in polish and politeness of manners, in choice entertainment, in the cultivation of men of letters and philosophers, of the art of conversation, and the expansion of drawing - room learning, the upper bourgeoisie emu |