y; remote allusions and derivations trouble no more: we see the
pattern of the stuff, and understand the whole tapestry. There is
a gradual clearing up on many points, and many baseless notions and
crude fancies are dropped. Even the post-haste passage of the business
American through the great cities, escorted by cheating couriers
and ignorant _valets de place_, unable to hold intercourse with the
natives of the country, and passing all his leisure hours with his
countrymen, who know 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 travelled 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