complexions--these seem
to me to be presented in a very sufficient abundance. The capacity of an
Englishwoman for being handsome strikes me as unlimited, and even if (I
repeat) it is in the luxurious class that it is most freely exercised,
yet among the daughters of the people one sees a great many fine points.
Among the men fine points are strikingly numerous--especially among the
younger ones. Now the same distinction is to be made--the gentlemen are
certainly handsomer than the vulgarians. But taking one young Englishman
with another, they are physically very well appointed. Their features
are finished, composed, as it were, more harmoniously than those of many
of their nearer and remoter neighbors, and their figures are apt to be
both powerful and compact. They present to view very much fewer
accidental noses and inexpressive mouths, fewer sloping shoulders and
ill-planted heads of hair, than their American kinsmen. Speaking always
from the sidewalk, it may be said that as the spring increases in London
and the symptoms of the season multiply, the beautiful young men who
adorn the West-End pavements, and who advance before you in couples,
arm-in-arm, fair-haired, gray-eyed, athletic, slow-strolling, ambrosial,
are among the most brilliant features of the brilliant period. I have it
at heart to add that if the English are handsomer than ourselves, they
are also very much uglier. Indeed I think that all the European peoples
are uglier than the American; we are far from producing those
magnificent types of facial eccentricity which flourish among older
civilizations. American ugliness is on the side of physical poverty and
meanness; English on that of redundancy and monstrosity. In America
there are few grotesques; in England there are many--and some of them
are almost handsome!

The element of the grotesque was very noticeable to me in the most
striking collection of the shabbier English types that I had seen since
I came to London. The occasion of my seeing them was the funeral of Mr.
George Odger, which befell some four or five weeks before the Easter
period. Mr. George Odger, it will be remembered, was an English radical
agitator, of humble origin, who had distinguished himself by a perverse
desire to get into Parliament. He exercised, I believe, the useful
profession of shoemaker, and he knocked in vain at the door that opens
but to golden keys. But he was a useful and honorable man, and his own
people gave him a