gments_ of God."

If there is a little exaggeration about the following portrait of the
Englishman, it has truth enough to excuse its high coloring, and the
likeness will be smilingly recognized by every stout Briton.

"They drink brandy like water, cannot expend their quantities of
waste strength on riding, hunting, swimming, and fencing, and run
into absurd follies with the gravity of the Eumenides. They stoutly
carry into every nook and corner of the earth their turbulent sense;
leaving no lie uncontradicted; no pretension unexamined. They chew
hasheesh; cut themselves with poisoned creases, swing their hammock
in the boughs of the Bohon Upas, taste every poison, buy every
secret; at Naples, they put St. Januarius's blood in an alembic;
they saw a hole into the head of the 'winking virgin' to know why
she winks; measure with an English foot-rule every cell of the
inquisition, every Turkish Caaba, every Holy of Holies; translate
and send to Bentley the arcanum, bribed and bullied away from
shuddering Bramins; and measure their own strength by the terror
they cause."

This last audacious picture might be hung up as a prose pendant to
Marvell's poetical description of Holland and the Dutch.

"A saving stupidity marks and protects their perception as the
curtain of the eagle's eye. Our swifter Americans, when they first
deal with English, pronounce them stupid; but, later, do them
justice as people who wear well, or hide their strength.--High and
low, they are of an unctuous texture.--Their daily feasts argue a
savage vigor of body.--Half their strength they put not forth. The
stability of England is the security of the modern world."

Perhaps nothing in any of his vigorous paragraphs is more striking than
the suggestion that "if hereafter the war of races often predicted,
and making itself a war of opinions also (a question of despotism
and liberty coming from Eastern Europe), should menace the English
civilization, these sea-kings may take once again to their floating
castles and find a new home and a second millennium of power in their
colonies."

In reading some of Emerson's pages it seems as if another Arcadia, or
the new Atlantis, had emerged as the fortunate island of Great Britain,
or that he had reached a heaven on earth where neither moth nor rust
doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal,--or if
they