ere are generally so very red that they produce a
great impression of redness, an impression that lasts and remains
salient in the memory. A delicately graduated and healthy bloom is not
very common. And so the fat women are so very fat that they seem to
take up a great part of the island. But the little London 'gent,' with
whom Leech has made us so familiar, you meet everywhere in the great
city. Sunday before last, loitering in the cloisters of Westminster, I
stopped to look at a tablet in the wall. There were three of these men
before me, and the number soon increased to seven. I looked over _the
hats_--round felt hats--of the whole seven without raising my chin.
I remember that like Rosalind I am 'more than common tall,' but I never
did anything like that at home. At the Horse Guards they put their
finest men as sentinels, mounted, on each side of the gate. Well, they
are fine fellows, and would be very uncomfortable chaps to meet, except
in a friendly way; a detachment of them riding up St. James's street
the other morning, with their cuirasses like mirrors, and the coats of
their big black horses almost as bright, was a spectacle which it
seemed to me could not be surpassed for its union of military splendor
and the promise of bitter business in a fight; but Maine, or Vermont,
or Connecticut, or Kentucky can turn out whole regiments of bigger and
stronger men. Colonel M----, whom I met in Canada, said the same to me
when he thought he was talking to an Englishman. I wonder that he ever
forgave me the things he said to me during his brief self-deception;
for they were true. But he was a good fellow and bore no malice.
Nevertheless, you sometimes meet here a very fine man, or a big,
blooming beauty, and in either case the impression is stronger and more
memorable than in a like case it is apt to be with us; chiefly, I
think, because of their dress and 'set up,' which in such cases--as in
that of the Guards and Dragoons--is apt to be very pronounced."

I will add here, in passing, that this English "set up," particularly
in the case of almost all Englishmen of any pretensions, is
distinctive, and is in a great measure the cause of the impression of
superior good looks and strength on their side. It appears in a marked
degree in all military persons, rank and file as well as officers, and
in the police force, the men of which are on the whole inferior in
stature and bulk to ours--leaving the big Broadway squad, most of