littering
levee!--of Burns, or Scott, or Beethoven, or Wellington, or Goethe,
or any container of transcendent power, passing for nobody!--of
Epaminondas, "who never says anything, but will listen eternally!"--of
Goethe, who preferred trifling subjects and common expressions in
intercourse with strangers, worse rather than better clothes, and to
appear a little more capricious than he was! There are advantages in the
old hat and box-coat. I have heard, that, throughout this country, a
certain respect is paid to good broadcloth: but dress makes a little
restraint; men will not commit themselves. But the box-coat is like
wine; it unlocks the tongue, and men say what they think. An old poet
says,--

"Go far and go sparing;
For you'll find it certain,
The poorer and the baser you appear,
The more you'll look through still."[A]

[Footnote A: Beaumont and Fletcher: The Tamer Tamed.]

Not much otherwise Milnes writes, in the "Lay of the Humble":--

"To me men are for what they are,
They wear no masks with me."

'Tis odd that our people should have--not water on the brain,--but
a little gas there. A shrewd foreigner said of the Americans, that
"whatever they say has a little the air of a speech." Yet one of the
traits down in the books, as distinguishing the Anglo-Saxon, is a trick
of self-disparagement. To be sure, in old, dense countries, among a
million of good coats, a fine coat comes to be no distinction, and you
find humorists. In an English party, a man with no marked manners or
features, with a face like red dough, unexpectedly discloses wit,
learning, a wide range of topics, and personal familiarity with good men
in all parts of the world, until you think you have fallen upon some
illustrious personage. Can it be that the American forest has refreshed
some weeds of old Pictish barbarism just ready to die out,--the love of
the scarlet feather, of beads, and tinsel? The Italians are fond of
red clothes, peacock-plumes, and embroidery; and I remember, one rainy
morning in the city of Palermo, the street was in a blaze with scarlet
umbrellas. The English have a plain taste. The equipages of the grandees
are plain. A gorgeous livery indicates new and awkward city-wealth. Mr.
Pitt, like Mr. Pym, thought the title of _Mister_ good against any king
in Europe. They have piqued themselves on governing the whole world in
the poor, plain, dark committee-room which the House of Commons sat in
before the fire.