irritated, many years since, by the strictures
of Mrs. Trollope, and stung to the quick
by her sneers at the national peculiarities of
"calculating" and spitting, thought they could
throw the taunt back in our teeth by assuming
that we were a nation of cockneys, hopelessly
given to misplacing our Hs. I had no sooner
put down the lively chronique containing the Joe
Millerisms, than I took up a copy of the New
York Times, a paper of very high character and
respectability, and whose editor, Mr. Henry
Raymond, one of the most distinguished of living
American politicians, is doing good service
to the republic by striving—almost alone,
unhappily—to stem the tide of the intolerance and
tyranny of the dominant faction. In a leading
article of the New York Times I read, that when
the British Lion was reproached with his blockade-running
sins, and other violations of neutrality
during the war, the hypocritical beast turned up
his "cotton-coloured eyes" and whimpered,
"Thou cannot say Hi did it." The gentleman
who wrote the leader doubtless thought he
had hit us hard with that "Hi." He would
have shot nearer the bull's-eye had he asked
why Lord Russell is always "obleged" instead
of obliged, and why the noble proprietor of
Knowsley is Lord "Derby" to one set of politicians
and Lord "Darby" to another. But these
little niceties of criticism seem to escape our
neighbours. The imputation of cockneyism is a
bit of mud that will stick. The Americans have
made up their minds that we are "Halways
waunting the walour of hour harms," and
"hexulting hover hour appiness hunder the ouse
of anover." No disclaimers on our part will
cause them to abandon their position. Nor in
this case, nor in that of "Shocking," do we lie
open, I venture to think, to accusations of a
tu quoque nature. We caricature our neighbours
more closely and observantly than they do
us. We have found out long since that the
Yankee is not invariably a sallow man in a
broad-brimmed straw hat, and a suit of striped
nankeen, who sits all day in a rocking-chair with his
feet on the mantelpiece, sucking mint julep
through a straw. We know the circumstances
under which he will put his feet up, and the
seasons most favourable to the consumption of
juleps. We have even ceased to draw him as
he really was frequently visible, some twenty
years since, as a cadaverous straight-haired
individual, clean shaved, in a black tail-coat and
pantaloons, a black satin waistcoat, and a fluffy
hat stuck on the back of his head, and the
integument of his left cheek much distended by a
plug of tobacco.

The English painter of manners takes the
modern American as he finds him: a tremendous
dandy, rather "loud" in make-up, fiercely
moustachioed and bearded, ringed and chained to the
eyes, and, on the continent of Europe at least,
quoting Rafaelles and Titians, Canovas and
Thorwaldsens, as confidently as he would discourse of
quartz or petroleum in Wall-street. We know
that he has long since ceased to "calculate" or
"reckon," and that it is much, now, if he
"guesses" or "expects." Not long ago, at
Venice, an old English traveller was telling me
of an American family with whom he had
travelled from Florence to Bologna. One of
the young ladies of the party, it seems, did not
approve of the railway accommodation, and
addressed the Italian guard in this wise: "My
Christian friend, is this a first-class kyar, or a
cattle-waggon?" At a subsequent stage of the
journey the eldest gentleman of the group had
remarked: "Say, if any of you gals bought
frames at Florence, I can supply you with a
lot o' picturs I got at Rome, cheap." "They
were model Yankees," the old English traveller
chuckled, as he told me the story. "Not at
all," I made bold to answer  "they were very
exceptional Yankees indeed. They were,
probably, shoddy people of the lowest class, rapidly
enriched, and who had rushed off to Europe
to air their new jewellery and their vulgarity."
Nine-tenths of the Americans one meets
travelling abroad now-a-days are well-informed and
intelligent persons, often more fully appreciative
of the beauties of art than middle-class English
tourists. The American's ambition extends to
everything, in the heavens above and on the
earth beneath, and in the waters under the
earth. If he doesn't appreciate Italian pictures,
his wife and daughters will, so that at least
there shall be a decent amount of connoisseurship
in the family; whereas to the middle-class
English foreign picture-galleries are usually an
intolerable bore; and Paterfamilias very
probably labours, besides, under a vague and
secretly uneasy feeling that it does not become
a man with less than twenty thousand a year
and a handle to his name to talk of Rafaelles
and Titians. There may be vulgar pretenders
among the Americans whom one meets roving
through the churches and galleries of the
Continent—among what nation are vulgarity and
pretence not to be found?—but take them, for
all in all, the love and appreciation for high art,
although its very elements are of yesterday's
introduction, are more generally discriminated in
the United States than in England. The amazing
development of photography, and the consequent
circulation of the noblest examples of art at very
cheap rates, together with the American mania
for travelling, are the leading causes of their
precocious proficiency in studies in which our
middle classes are, as yet, but timid and bungling
beginners.

It is true that they have not yet learnt to
discriminate between Englishmen whose speech is
that of educated gentlemen, and those who put
their Hs in the wrong place. Perhaps their
ears are at fault. There are none so deaf as
those who will not hear. But I adhere to my
position, that we are able to jot down their little
changes of manners more accurately than they
are able to do ours. We do not wear our jokes
against them threadbare, or worry their foibles
to death after the French fashion. Pennsylvania
repudiation was a good jest in its day, made all
the more bitter by being almost wholly destitute
of foundation in truth; but no one could help