ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 53 



unhappily could bring over no English better than Shaks- 

 peare s ; and we did not stammer as they had learned to do 

 from the courtiers, who in this way flattered the Hanoverian 

 king, a foreigner among the people he had come to reign 

 over. Worse than all, we might have the noblest ideas and 

 the finest sentiments in the world, but we vented them through 

 that organ by which men are led rather than leaders, though 

 some physiologists would persuade us that Nature furnishes 

 her captains with a fine handle to their faces that Opportu 

 nity may get a good purchase on them for dragging them to 

 the front. 



This state of things was so painful that excellent people 

 were not wanting who gave their whole genius to reproducing 

 here the original Bull, whether by gaiters, the cut of their 

 whiskers, by a factitious brutality in their tone, or by an 

 accent that was for ever tripping and falling flat over the 

 tangled roots of our common tongue. Martyrs to a false 

 ideal, it never occurred to them that nothing is more hateful 

 to gods and men than a second-rate Englishman, and for the 

 very reason that this planet never produced a more splendid 

 creature than the first-rate one, witness Shakspeare and the 

 Indian Mutiny. Witness that truly sublime self-abnegation of 

 those prisoners lately among the bandits of Greece, where 

 average men gave an example of quiet fortitude for which all 

 the stoicism of antiquity can show no match. If we could con 

 trive to be not too unobtrusively our simple selves, we 

 should be the most delightful of human beings, and the most 

 original ; whereas, when the plating of Anglicism rubs off, as 

 it always will in points that come to much wear, we are 

 liable to very unpleasing conjectures about the quality of the 

 metal underneath. Perhaps one reason why the average 

 Briton spreads himself here with such an easy air of supe 

 riority may be owing to the fact that he meets with so many 

 bad imitations as to conclude himself the only real thing in a 

 wilderness of shams. He fancies himself moving through an 

 endless Bloomsbury, where his mere apparition confers 

 honour as an avatar of the court-end of the universe. Not a 

 Bull of them all but is persuaded he bears Europa upon his 

 back. This is the sort of fellow whose patronage is so 

 divertingly insufferable. Thank heaven, he is not the only 

 specimen of cater-cousinship from the dear old mother 

 island that is shown to ITS J Among genuine things, I know 



