ffee, deeply wrinkled across
the forehead, and grimly furrowed about the month, with whom these
heavy-cheeked English lawyers, slow-paced and fat-witted as they must
needs be, would stand very little chance in a professional contest. How
that matter might turn out I am unqualified to decide. But I state these
results of my earliest glimpses of Englishmen, not for what they are
worth, but because I ultimately gave them up as worth little or nothing.
In course of time, I came to the conclusion that Englishmen of all ages
are a rather good-looking people, dress in admirable taste from their
own point of view, and, under a surface never silken to the touch, have
a refinement of manners too thorough and genuine to be thought of as a
separate endowment,--that is to say, if the individual himself be a man
of station, and has had gentlemen for his father and grandfather. The
sturdy Anglo-Saxon nature does not refine itself short of the third
generation. The tradesmen, too, and all other classes, have their own
proprieties. The only value of my criticisms, therefore, lay in their
exemplifying the proneness of a traveller to measure one people by the
distinctive characteristics of another,--as English writers invariably
measure us, and take upon themselves to be disgusted accordingly,
instead of trying to find out some principle of beauty with which we may
be in conformity.

In due time we were summoned to the table, and went thither in no solemn
procession, but with a good deal of jostling, thrusting behind, and
scrambling for places when we reached our destination. The legal
gentlemen, I suspect, were responsible for this indecorous zeal, which I
never afterwards remarked in a similar party. The dining-hall was of
noble size, and, like the other rooms of the suite, was gorgeously
painted and gilded and brilliantly illuminated. There was a splendid
table-service, and a noble array of footmen, some of them in plain
clothes, and others wearing the town-livery, richly decorated with
gold-lace, and themselves excellent specimens of the blooming
young-manhood of Britain. When we were fairly seated, it was certainly
an agreeable spectacle to look up and down the long vista of earnest
faces, and behold them so resolute, so conscious that there was an
important business in hand, and so determined to be equal to the
occasion. Indeed, Englishman or not, I hardly know what can be prettier
than a snow-white table-cloth, a huge heap of flowe