other way in which heart is found to answer to heart is too obvious
to require to be long dwelt upon. Men not only see according to the
light they shed from their own breasts,--whether it be the sunshine of
generosity or the hell-flames of bad passions,--but they attract to
themselves spirits like their own. The very same persons appear very
differently to a traveller who calls into exercise all their best
qualities, and to one who has an affinity with their worst: but it is a
yet more important consideration that actually different elements of
society will range themselves round the observer according to the
scepticism or faith of his temper, the purity or depravity of his
tastes, and the elevation or insignificance of his objects. The
Americans, somewhat nettled with the injustice of English travellers'
reports of their country, have jokingly proposed to take lodgings in
Wapping for some thorough-bred American vixen, of low tastes and coarse
manners, and employ her to write an account of English morals and
manners from what she might see in a year's abode in the choice locality
selected for her. This would be no great exaggeration of the process of
observation of foreigners which is perpetually going on.

What should gamesters know of the philanthropists of the society they
pass through? or the profligate, of the real state of domestic life?
What can the moral sceptic report of religious or philosophical
confessorship in any nation? or the sordid trader, of the higher kinds
of intellectual cultivation? or the dandy, of the extent and
administration of charity? It may be said that neither can the
philanthropic traveller--the missionary--see otherwise than partially
for want of "knowledge of the world;" that persons of sober habits can
learn nothing that is going on in the moral depths of society; and the
good are actually scoffed at for their absence from many scenes of human
life, and their supposed ignorance of many things in human nature. But
it is certain that the best part of every man's mind is far more a
specimen of himself than the worst; and that the characteristics of a
society, in like manner, are to be traced in the wisest and most genial
of its pervading ideas and common transactions, instead of those
disgraceful ones which are common to all. Swindlers, drunkards, people
of low tastes and bad passions, are found in every country, and nowhere
characterise a nation; while the reverence of man in America, the