for his own amusement. The English country gentleman of the present
day is anything but a Squire Western, though he does retain all his relish
for field sports.

The character of an Englishman, under its most refined aspect, has some
disagreeable points which jar unpleasantly on the foreigner not accustomed
to them. The consciousness of national superiority, combined with natural
feelings of independence, gives him an air of arrogance, though it must be
owned that this is never betrayed in his own house,--I may almost say in
his own country. But abroad, when he seems to institute a comparison
between himself and the people he is thrown with, it becomes so obvious
that he is the most unpopular, not to say odious, person in the world.
Even the open hand with which he dispenses his bounty will not atone for
the violence he offers to national vanity.

There are other defects, which are visible even in his most favored
circumstances. Such is his bigotry, surpassing everything in a quiet
passive form, that has been witnessed since the more active bigotry of the
times of the Spanish Philips. Such, too, is the exclusive, limited range
of his knowledge and conceptions of all political and social topics and
relations. The Englishman, the cultivated Englishman, has no standard of
excellence borrowed from mankind. His speculation never travels beyond his
own little--great little--island. That is the world to him. True, he
travels, shoots lions among the Hottentots, chases the grizzly bear over
the Rocky Mountains, kills elephants in India and salmon on the coast of
Labrador, comes home, and very likely makes a book. But the scope of his
ideas does not seem to be enlarged by all this. The body travels, not the
mind. And, however he may abuse his own land, he returns home as hearty a
John Bull, with all his prejudices and national tastes as rooted, as
before. The English--the men of fortune--all travel. Yet how little
sympathy they show for other people or institutions, and how slight is the
interest they take in them! They are islanders, cut off from the great
world. But their island is, indeed, a world of its own. With all their
faults, never has the sun shone--if one may use the expression in
reference to England--all a more noble race, or one that has done more for
the great interests of humanity.

NOTES.--Nimrod is spoken of in Genesis (x. 9) as "a mighty hunter." Thus
the name came to be applied to any one devoted to hunting.