discriminations and categories, but a vague groping for it? The De
Coppets (again as more especially and most impressively interpreted by
the subtle Louis) enjoyed the pre-eminence of being European; they had
dropped during the scholastic term of 1853-4 straight from the lake of
Geneva into the very bosom of Mr. Richard Pulling Jenks's select resort
for young gentlemen, then situated in Broadway below Fourth Street; and
had lately been present at an historic pageant--whether or no
celebrating the annals of the town of Coppet I know not--in which
representatives of their family had figured in armour and on horseback
as the Barons (to our comprehension) de Coup or Cou. Their father was
thus of the Canton de Vaud--only their mother had been native among
ourselves and sister to the Colonel of the castellations. But what was
the most vivid mark of the brothers, and vividest on the part of the
supersubtle Louis, was his French treatment of certain of our native
local names, Ohio and Iowa for instance, which he rendered, as to their
separate vowels, with a daintiness and a delicacy invidious and
imperturbable, so that he might have been Chateaubriand declaiming Les
Natchez at Madame Recamier's--O-ee-oh and Ee-o-wah; a proceeding in him,
a violence offered to his serried circle of little staring and glaring
New Yorkers supplied with the usual allowance of fists and boot-toes,
which, as it was clearly conscious, I recollect thinking unsurpassed for
cool calm courage. Those _were_ the right names--which we owed wholly to
the French explorers and Jesuit Fathers; so much the worse for us if we
vulgarly didn't know it. I lose myself in admiration of the consistency,
the superiority, the sublimity, of the not at all game-playing, yet in
his own way so singularly sporting, Louis. He was naturally and
incorruptibly French--as, so oddly, I have known other persons of both
sexes to be whose English was naturally and incorruptibly American; the
appearance being thus that the possession of indigenous English alone
forms the adequate barrier and the assured racial ground. (Oh the queer
reversions observed on the part of Latinized compatriots in the course
of a long life--the remarkable drops from the quite current French or
Italian to the comparatively improvised native idiom, with the resulting
effect of the foreign tongue used as a domestic and the domestic, that
is the original American, used as a foreign tongue, or without inherited
conf