w no
more than himself, clears his mind of some mistakes,--lifts some mists
from his horizon.

There are three species: First, the servile American,--a being utterly
shallow, thoughtless, worthless. He comes abroad to spend his money
and indulge his tastes. His object in Europe is to have fashionable
clothes, good foreign cookery, to know some titled persons, and
furnish himself with coffee-house gossip, by retailing which among
those less traveled and as uninformed as himself he can win importance
at home. I look with unspeakable contempt on this class,--a class
which has all the thoughtlessness and partiality of the exclusive
classes in Europe, without any of their refinement, or the chivalric
feeling which still sparkles among them here and there. However,
though these willing serfs in a free age do some little hurt, and
cause some annoyance at present, they cannot continue long; our
country is fated to a grand independent existence, and as its laws
develop, these parasites of a bygone period must wither and drop away.

Then there is the conceited American, instinctively bristling and
proud of--he knows not what. He does not see, not he! that the history
of humanity, for many centuries, is likely to have produced results it
requires some training, some devotion, to appreciate and profit by.
With his great clumsy hands, only fitted to work on a steam-engine, he
seizes the old Cremona violin, makes it shriek with anguish in his
grasp, and then declares he thought it was all humbug before he came,
and now he knows it; that there is not really any music in these old
things; that the frogs in one of our swamps make much finer, for they
are young and alive. To him the etiquettes of courts and camps, the
ritual of the Church, seem simply silly,--and no wonder, profoundly
ignorant as he is of their origin and meaning. Just so the legends
which are the subjects of pictures, the profound myths which are
represented in the antique marbles, amaze and revolt him; as, indeed,
such things need to be judged of by another standard than that of the
Connecticut Blue Laws. He criticizes severely pictures, feeling quite
sure that his natural senses are better means of judgment than the
rules of connoisseurs,--not feeling that to see such objects mental
vision as well as fleshly eyes are needed, and that something is aimed
at in art beyond the imitation of the commonest forms of nature. This
is Jonathan in the sprawling state, the booby