1827.] The Four Nations. 283 



partaking of cunning. You at once perceive that he has no ideas of what 

 it is to be shadowed by a hill, or sheltered by a cave ; but that, from the-, 

 beginning of life, he has had his horizon equally level throughout, and 

 could, with equal freedom, turn his observation to every point of the- 

 compass. Your Scotchman, on the other hand, places himself hesitatingly 

 upon the ground, as if he were trying to persuade it either that he is not 

 there, or that the pressure of his corpus can give it no inconvenience. His 

 feet are brought close together, by a contrary flexure at the top and 

 bottom of his femeral bones ; he assumes somewhat of a Z-shape, or rather 

 that of the long Italian / while his facial line falls almost as much in 

 front of the perpendicular, as that of a young bride receiving her first 

 visitors. Instead of that straight-forward, cannon-like gaze, which the 

 Englishman directs towards whatever strikes his fancy, the eyes of the 

 Scotchman twinkle from under his depressed brows, just like poachers 

 peeping through a hedge, or scouts reconnoitreing a battered wall by 

 moonlight. Your Cambrian takes an attitude different from both, and 

 bears himself not with that admiration and possession of his own person, 

 which are characteristic of the Englishman ; or with the pliant litheness 

 of the Scot but, as if he scorned all about him, and belonged to the 

 elder house, which, by primogeniture, is destined to bear rule over all the 

 rest. His face is thrown just as much in the rear of the perpendicular as 

 that of the Scotsman is deflected to the front ; and this, together with the 

 peculiar construction of the lower part of his face, gives him an air of 

 sensuality and animal irrascibility, of which there is scarcely a trace in 

 either of his co-islanders. Your Irishman is still different : he is a bird 

 perpetually on the wing an atom always in motion ; and his whole 

 body, as well as every individual member of it, retains not the same 

 posture for two seconds. If he has any point to carry, or any purpose to 

 serve, the knobs and prominences which are native to his features are lit 

 up with smiles, which, to a shallow observer, have all the appearance of 

 a visage blessed with perpetual sunshine although, to those who can- 

 scan a little deeper, the gleaminess is nothing more than an occasional 

 glare thrown upon habitual sterility and storm ; and, under what he con- 

 ceives to be his most fascinating aspect, shrewd observation may always 

 find out that there is a masked battery, or a mine ready prepared ; and 

 that he will, without much knowledge or care how, discharge the one,, 

 or explode the other, against the very subject of his highest adulation. 



Such are the Four Nations in a single line of their appearances ; and 

 many have hereupon built the whole structure of their several characters 

 have said; that the Englishman is bold, open, and manly, but haughty 

 withal, and not over-prone to reason sagaciously, or to draw his inferences 

 with very sound logic ; that the Scotsman is cold, cautious, and cunning 

 ever on the watch to worm himself into place and profit, by anticipating 

 the wishes of his superiors, and paralysing and supplanting the efforts of 

 his equals ; that the Welchman is a mule in labour, and the father of a 

 mule in mind that he is laborious, trustworthy, and conscientious to a 

 proverb but that, while his god is his belly, his brains are there to wor- 

 'ship and that, morever, he is ever prone to brawl and fight, and the 

 more so, the less important the subject in dispute ; that the Irishman, all 

 passion and impulse at the mercy of the moment- uncertain -what may 



be his opinions, and reckless what may be his destiny the next hour 



pretends to every thing, arrogates every thing, and always concludes by 

 being little or nothing. 



2 O 2 



