up in the drawing-room. They were conventional everywhere. The
very men whom he met after his arrival in the streets of Southampton,
all looked as if they had been born with hat-brushes and clothes-brushes
in their hands. As a race, moreover, they had special defects. They
lacked delicacy and taste in conferring obligations or paying
compliments. They were utterly indifferent to the feelings of others.
There was a national propensity to blackguardism; and the English press,
in particular, calumniated its enemies, both political and (p. 137)
personal, with the coarsest vituperation.

These were not the sort of remarks to draw favorable notices from
British periodicals. Cooper soon had an opportunity to verify, in his
own experience, the truth of the last of his observations that have been
cited. Harsh, however, as was his language about England, it bore little
comparison to the severity with which he expressed himself about
America. The attacks on the newspaper press belong not here, but to the
account of the war he waged with it. The omission, however, will hardly
be noticed in the multitude of other matters he found to criticise.
Manners, customs, society, were touched throughout with an unsparing
hand. Common crimes, he admitted, were not so general with us as in
Europe, though mainly because we were exempt from temptation, but
uncommon meannesses did abound in a large circle of our population. Our
two besetting sins were canting and hypocrisy. We had far less publicity
in our pleasures than other nations; yet we had scarcely any domestic
privacy on account of the neighborhood. The whole country was full of a
village-like gossip which caused every man to think that he was a judge
of character, when he was not even a judge of facts. In most matters we
were humble imitators of the English. All their mistakes and
misjudgments we adopted except such as impaired our good opinion of
ourselves. It was a consequence that all their errors about foreign
countries had become our errors also. In a few cases, indeed, we were
compelled to be American; but whenever there was a tolerable chance we
endeavored to become second-class English. Wherever making money was in
view, we had but one soul and that was inventive enough; but when (p. 138)
it came to spending it we did not know how to set about it except
by routine. No people traveled as much as we; none traveled with so
little enjoyment or so few comforts. Taste and knowle