hat I should rather have the pair
of intellectual eyes which can see Homer as he saw him, than any other
mental quality I can think of." "But"--and mark this--"Mr. Arnold has
never seemed to me fortunate in his judgment about Americans . . . The
trouble with Mr. Arnold is that he never travelled in the United States
when on this side of the Atlantic. . . . He visited a great City or two,
but never made himself acquainted with the American people. He never
knew the sources of our power or the spirit of our people."

Senator Hoar, with a generous nature made thrice generous by the
mellowness of years, speaking of the man he hugely liked, tempered the
truth to a more than paternal mildness. But it is the truth. Matthew
Arnold, to put it bluntly, was wrong-headed in his judgment of America
and Americans to a degree which one living long in the United States
only comes slowly and reluctantly to understand. And if he so erred, how
shall all the lesser teachers from whom England gets its knowledge of
America keep straight?

But what the American people really objected to in Matthew Arnold was
not any blundering things that he said of them, but the fact that he
wore on inappropriate occasions in New York a brown checked suit.

* * * * *

And across all the gulf of more than twenty years there looms up in my
memory--"looms like some Homer-rock or Troy-tree"--the figure of the
Hon. S----y B----l flaunting his mustard coloured suit, gridironed with
a four-inch check, across three thousand miles of continent, to the
delight of cities, filling prairies with wonder and moving the Rocky
Mountains to undisguised mirth. And how could we others explain that he,
with his undeniably John-Bull-like breadth of shoulder and ruddy face,
was not a fair sample of the British aristocrat? Was he not an
Honourable and the son of a Baron and the "real thing" in every way? I
have no doubt that there still live in the prairie towns of North Dakota
and in the recesses of the mountains of Montana hundreds of men and
women, grown old now, who through all the mists of the years still
remember that lamentable figure; and to them, though they may have seen
and barely noticed ten thousand Englishmen since, the typical Britisher
still remains the Hon. S----y B----l.

It is not possible to say how far the influence of one man may extend. I
verily believe that twenty years ago those clothes of Matthew Arnold
stood for more in