n was a very great inconvenience, and, though he
conceived he could order his thinking as well as another, yet he found
a great defect. In the country, in long time, for want of good
conversation, one's understanding and invention contract a moss on them,
like an old paling in an orchard."

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the
nonsense out of a man. A great part of our education is sympathetic and
social. Boys and girls who have been brought up with well-informed and
superior people show in their manners an inestimable grace. Fuller says,
that "William, Earl of Nassau, won a subject from the King of Spain
every time he put off his hat." You cannot have one well-bred man
without a whole society of such. They keep each other up to any
high point. Especially women: it requires a great many cultivated
women,--saloons of bright, elegant, reading women, accustomed to ease
and refinement, to spectacles, pictures, sculpture, poetry, and to
elegant society,--in order that you should have one Madame de Stael.
The head of a commercial house, or a leading lawyer or politician, is
brought into daily contact with troops of men from all parts of the
country,--and those, too, the driving-wheels, the business-men of each
section,--and one can hardly suggest for an apprehensive man a
more searching culture. Besides, we must remember the high social
possibilities of a million of men. The best bribe which London offers
to-day to the imagination is, that, in such a vast variety of people
and conditions, one can believe there is room for persons of romantic
character to exist, and that the poet, the mystic, and the hero may hope
to confront their counterparts.

I wish cities could teach their best lesson,--of quiet manners. It is
the foible especially of American youth,--pretension. The mark of the
man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he
takes a low business-tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly,
promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his
fact. He calls his employment by its lowest name, and so takes from evil
tongues their sharpest weapon. His conversation clings to the weather
and the news, yet he allows himself to be surprised into thought, and
the unlocking of his learning and philosophy. How the imagination is
piqued by anecdotes of some great man passing incognito, as a king in
gray clothes!--of Napoleon affecting a plain suit at his g