Named Entity Results, Americans

y and even twenty years ago was quite unlike what it now is. Good Americans were said, when they died, to go to Paris, and even the wit of Toy, not the English. It was at the French court that fashionable Americans yearned to be presented; they uniformly preferred to live on the methods, for in the librarians' conventions of the last few years Americans have led and not followed. Even when we come on more intimate anld wish to be taken for an Englishman, for the simple reason that Americans are everywhere so much more popular. Nor would any one of our owe. Let us not disturb ourselves. Out of the fifty millions of Americans, the passing wave of Anglomania or Francomania reaches but a few he surface. Even the young men whom it reaches are at heart good Americans, and if another civil war or foreign war arose, would respond as l difference also, there seems every prospect that Englishmen and Americans will be farther apart, instead of nearer, fifty years hence than

oys are enhanced, cares diminished, by the presence in the room of a single person of charming manners. How shall such manners be obtained? Art and habit and the mere desire to please may do something, but not supply the place of a defective foundation. Nobody has ever summed up the different types of good manners so well as Tennyson: Kind nature is the best: those manners next That fit us like a nature second-hand; Which are indeed the manners of the great. It is curious how Americans in Europe vibrate between their French and English predilections, feeling the attractiveness of the French courtesy, and yet sometimes wondering whether it is more than skin-deep, and looking back in regret to the English method, which if blunt, is at least sincere. But when, as may happen, the French manner has a basis of real sincerity, how delightful the result! A charming American woman, the late Mrs. Sidney Brooks of New York, who retained into age all the attractiveness and much ev

XIX. on a certain humility in Americans. It has always seemed to me that Lowell's paper on the condescension of foreigners should be followed by one on the humility of Americans. It may be that we do not make that quality obtrusive when travelling abroad, for there we are frequently stung and goaded out of this fine constitAmericans. It may be that we do not make that quality obtrusive when travelling abroad, for there we are frequently stung and goaded out of this fine constitutional trait. My dear young lady, said the kind English clergyman to a certain American traveller in Europe, Let me urge you not to make use of that word unless you are willing to be known as an American. But suppose, said her mother, that my daughters have no objection to being known as Americans, what then? To this the good mAmericans, what then? To this the good man had no answer ready, as it was a contingency he had not foreseen. In such cases the bruised Yankee will turn upon his assailant; nor does he always fail to offer the original provocation. But it is chiefly at home and in our dealings with foreigners that the constitutional humility asserts itself. It is needless to deny tha

XXV. exalted stations. An accomplished English writer, endeavoring to explain to Americans, as many have done before him, how it is that educated men in England do not feel aggrieved at giving precedence to persons of mere hereditary rank, gives a curious illustration of the very habit criticised. He says that no sensible Englishman ever sees in it a want of real consideration for himself. The hosts simply employ a convenient rule, he says: the titled guests follow the order of their rwho happens to count among his ancestors a royal mistress or a brewer sufficiently wealthy to have been rewarded with a peerage. To the average republican mind he simply justifies the criticism, and prolongs that attitude which seems to most Americans so cringing; and which does more than any one difference, perhaps, to transmit from one generation to another the alienation between the two races. When some defender of slavery once claimed, in Dr. W. E. Channing's presence, that the slaves o

but a house of cards-showy, brilliant, with at least four distinct court suits, but insecure and liable to fall. Another recent event illustrates clearly, to Americans at least, this baseless and now meaningless institution, which nevertheless so dazzles many. The claims to the Lauderdale peerage, in regard to which several ofern cow-boy would be guilty of such brutality. And yet the last stronghold of the House of Cards is its supposed influence on manners. Not merely untravelled Americans, but even liberal Englishmen, and, still more, English-women, are even now fettered by the delusion. I remember having a long talk in England, a dozen years agoeditary privilege to establish its own standard, and which ends by imposing that standard on other people. The English aristocratic society, Matthew Arnold says, materializes the upper classes, vulgarizes the middle classes, and brutalizes the lower classes. For a few foolish Americans it does all three of these things at once.

XLII. city and country living. The newspapers are circulating a curious statement by Mr. Grant Allen--who is understood to be a Canadian by birth and an Englishman by residence — to the effect that Americans do not like country life, and that those who are able to do so flee from the rural regions as if there were a pestilence there. This is a curious caricature of the real facts-almost as curious as when the same writer finds something melancholy in the dandelions and violets, the aster, the other in the summer. In the mild winters of England, where there is not a month in the year in which some flower does not bloom out-of-doors, and hardly one in which some bird does not build its nest, this distinction is less sharp; and Americans are always surprised to find their English cousins staying in the country till Christmas, and then in London till July. But in our Northern States the distinction of seasons is so very marked as to be destined to mould the permanent habit of