INTRODUCTION xxix 



dying hate. So did Pisans and Florentines. 

 Bitter were the wars between German prin 

 cipalities in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen 

 turies. Tocqueville said in 1830 that he could 

 conceive of no hatred more poisonous than that 

 which the Americans then felt for England. 1 

 Kinship alone would not have been enough. 

 Kinship, however, was reinforced by a sense of 

 the common possession of a great literature and 

 great traditions. The New Englanders, bitter 

 as they often were toward England, could not 

 forget that Milton and Cromwell were English 

 men. Many a Virginian family was proud of its 

 Cavalier ancestry. So too, though it was at 

 one time the fashion among the English upper 

 and literary class to treat the Americans as a 

 purely commercial people, and to disparage their 

 literature, each nation had a genuine interest 

 in the other s performances and a capacity for 

 understanding the other which neither possessed 

 as toward any other people. Each was secretly 

 proud of the other, though neither would avow it. 

 The American masses would from 1814 down to 

 1871 have felt less repulsion from the notion of 

 armed strife than would the English, but fortu- 



1 One may, however, conjecture that in listening to the sharp words 

 of his New England friends he underrated an underlying sentiment 

 running the other way. 



