. We err more often than we
are aware of, when we judge of others by ourselves. English tourists
have all fallen into this mistake, in their, estimate of the Americans.
They judge them by their own standard; they attribute effects to wrong
causes, forgetting that a different tone of feeling, produced by a
different social and political state from their own, must naturally
produce dissimilar results.

Any person reading the last sketch containing the account, given by Mr.
Slick of the House of Commons, his opinion of his own abilities as a
speaker, and his aspiration after a seat in that body, for the purpose
of "skinning," as he calls it, impertinent or stupid members, could not
avoid coming to the conclusion that he was a conceited block-head; and
that if his countrymen talked in that absurd manner, they must be the
weakest, and most vain-glorious people in the world.

That he is a vain man, cannot be denied--self-taught men are apt to be
so every where; but those who understand the New England humour, will
at once perceive, that he has spoken in his own name merely as a
personification, and that the whole passage means after all, when
transposed into that phraseology which an Englishman would use, very
little more than this, that the House of Commons presented a noble
field for a man of abilities as a public speaker; but that in fact, it
contained very few such persons. We must not judge of words or phrases,
when used by foreigners, by the sense we attribute to them, but
endeavour to understand the meaning they attach to them themselves.

In Mexico, if you admire any thing, the proprietor immediately says,
"Pray do me the honour to consider it yours, I shall be most happy, if
you will permit me, to place it upon you, (if it be an ornament), or to
send it to your hotel," if it be of a different description. All
this means in English, a present; in Mexican Spanish, a civil speech,
purporting that the owner is gratified, that it meets the approbation
of his visiter. A Frenchman, who heard this grandiloquent reply to his
praises of a horse, astonished his friend, by thanking him in terms
equally amplified, accepting it, and riding it home.

Mr. Slick would be no less amazed, if understood literally. He has used
a peculiar style; here again, a stranger would be in error, in supposing
the phraseology common to all Americans. It is peculiar only to a
certain class of persons in a certain state of life, and in a particular